6 Ways Social Media Marketing Is Changing (For the Better)

We’ve been at this social game for a while now, you and me. We saw it grow up from a minor phenomenon to a mainstream communication channel. And we were there for the emergence of “pinning” (no longer just a wrestling term), the broad use of Twitter in crisis reporting, and seemingly countless redesigns of the Facebook Wall, err ...
Timeline
.

In such a rapidly changing space, it’s hard not to get pulled into an ongoing analysis of where we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re headed next. In this most recent round of reassessment, a handful of trends have caught my attention. And, unlike the
loss of LinkedIn Answers
, I’m feeling pretty good about them. So let's take a closer look at how social media is changing ... for the better.

1) Social Media Is Gaining Weight as a Sales Tool

Social media has always enjoyed firm footing as a marketing and communications tool. But more and more, sales teams are finding ways to incorporate it into their sales processes; and those that do are seeing some pretty impressive results. In a talk with HubSpot the other day, Kurlan and Associates' Vice President and self-proclaimed “reformed salesman”
Frank Belzer
noted that he dedicates time each day to content creation and social media.

“Sales should help with content and build a reputation for thought leadership,” Belzer advises. He explained that content creation and social media outreach should be incorporated into bonus structures and sales schedules, and followed up with a story about a lead who, after months of avoiding sales calls, finally converted after Belzer left a thoughtful and relevant comment on the lead’s blog post.

Another example of social being used well for sales came to us via the
Matchist blog
. Matchist, a service that matches companies with developers, was weighing a purchase decision ...

How companies can use social media as a sales tool:

Set up alerts and monitoring:
Hiten Shah didn’t just happen upon Stella’s question; he likely has
social media monitoring
and alerts set up to notify him of relevant conversations happening around his company's and industry's keywords in social media.

Keep it useful and 'inbound':
Treat social like an outbound promotion channel and you’ll end up alienating your audience. Instead, set time aside to thoughtfully respond to questions or share helpful content.

2) Social Media Is Becoming Less of a Side Game

Social media grew up alongside other marketing channels, and with the exception of social sharing/follow buttons on websites and in emails, it has largely remained an isolated channel. But there’s one big problem inherent to that separation: a fragmented customer experience. A lead’s interactions with your company in social media have as much to do with their purchasing decision as their behavior on your website or their interactions with your emails. So whether it be by
tagging each social share with a tracking code
or through more advanced
integrated software
, more and more companies are finding ways to pull data from social media into the rest of their marketing outlook and strategy. Part of this requires technology, and another part, a cultural shift inside your organization:

The Technical Shift

Marketing platforms like HubSpot
were built to integrate all of your marketing channels into one seamless view, from email to website to social media -- and beyond. Using a single software platform to manage each of your channels reduces communication gaps and enables you to see how each channel is contributing to your bottom line.

The Cultural Shift

Make sure your entire team is actively listening to prospects and customers in social media. Establish a standard practice for how inquiries via social are answered and what internal notification needs to take place as a result of each interaction.

3) Companies Are Looking Beyond Engagement at ROI Metrics

In the beginning, "engagement" was all the rage. Other channels couldn’t quite attain the level of engagement social media could, and in the absence of any other metrics, engagement became the primary way marketers evaluated their success on social. Today, things are much, much different.

Technology has caught up with marketers’ need for a sharper way to gauge ROI, and many companies are beginning to evolve from measuring more superficial social media metrics like clicks, retweets, and Likes to tracking metrics that are tied more closely to a company’s bottom line. Made possible by integrating social tools with a contacts database or a CRM and sharing data across platforms, companies like HubSpot customer
Votility
, an online advocacy software
,
have been able to refocus their strategy on
leads
generated
through social media. Sarah Papachristos, social media manager at
Great Island Technologies
who worked with Votility on the effort, recently walked us through
how they did it
.

After refocusing their strategy on leads in addition to engagement metrics,
Great Island increased their leads generated through social media by 650%
. And today, nearly 1 out of every 10 visitors that comes from LinkedIn becomes a lead for Great Island.

4) Social Search Is Getting Real

"
Social search
" is an evolving term for the way search engines are factoring content from a user's social network into the results they get for their search queries. Marketers started taking note of social search with the development of
Google+
and the launch of Bing’s social search engine last summer. But the social search trend has continued to get more and more attention from search engines. Last week, Facebook joined the ranks by announcing
Graph Search
, a search engine that uses social signals to elevate more relevant, personalized results. Just days after that announcement, we also learned about
Bing's initiative to add 5x more Facebook content to its search results
.

Social media blogger
Jeff Bullas
thinks we'll be seeing more marketing strategies incorporating social search in the coming year. He writes that we should “expect to see more content marketing tools, tactics, and strategies that accept the fact that social, search, and content are increasingly integrated and intertwined." There are a number of
ways you can prepare for social search
, but here are a couple to help you get started:

Start Using Authorship Tags in Your Content

Identify and Nurture Your Social Media Advocates

Because social search inherently prioritizes content that has been shared by others, it's important to understand who is currently sharing your content and find ways to encourage that behavior. Make sure you are thanking your social media evangelists and similarly sharing their content, too. As we mentioned earlier,
tools that integrate social behavior with your contacts database
can make this much easier.

5) Visual- and Discovery-Based Search Is Continuing to Grow

Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr ... you're hearing these names pretty often these days, right? For good reason.
According to comScore
,
Pinterest buyers spend more money, more often, and on more items than any of the other top five social media sites
. While visual content got a head start in ecommerce and B2C companies, its effects are now spanning across industries.

Pinterest in particular has started to encourage companies to leverage its platform. In November, it
introduced business accounts
and added a slew of new services to help you drive traffic to your website. When it comes to optimizing your marketing strategy for visual discovery engines like Pinterest, it helps to start using clear, compelling images in your content. And this also extends to social sites like Facebook and Google+, which are also displaying images more prominently than ever before. In fact, a
recent HubSpot study
showed that
photos on Facebook generate 53% more Likes than the average post
.

Here are a few helpful guides and blog posts to help you get started with visual content:

6) Mobile Is Becoming the Primary Way to Access Social Media

According to Nielsen
,
time spent on mobile apps and the mobile web account for 63% of the year-over-year growth
in overall time spent using social media
. Mobile is rapidly becoming the primary way we consume and interact with social (and nearly all) content.

As a result, we're starting to see companies regard mobile as a primary communication channel. From
optimizing their content for mobile devices
to encouraging the use of mobile for things like live tweeting and geotagging, companies are starting to keep their eye out for ways mobile can enable better content consumption.

What will come next is up to the creativity of marketing departments, but what we do know is this:

It's about more than just smartphones
. Optimizing for mobile will need to take into account
all
the devices a consumer uses, from phones, to tablets, to whatever the next big thing is. And ...

It's about the whole experience.
While your Facebook shares and tweets may be easily consumed on mobile, what happens when a mobile user clicks through to the content you shared? Is it easily readable? If there's a form, is it plausible that a mobile user could complete it?

So ... who's excited? The pace of change in social media can make your head spin sometimes, but that's exactly what makes it such a forward-leaning marketing channel. Help us out -- what changes are underway for your own social media strategies that I haven't included here?

What do you think will be the biggest opportunity or challenge in social media marketing this year?

I couldn't agree more with your second point. Social Media used to be an addon - something we'd use just for the sake of it. As time passed, it jumped into the forefront of our marketing campaigns and became an absolute neccesity. A combination of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and many other up and coming social media websites can end up being the difference between high targeted traffic to your website, and none at all.

I'd like to state the importance of Twitter from my own personal experience. When I started out in Internet Marketing, I used conventional techniques to drive targeted traffic to my website. These techniques included forum posting, article submitting, and keyword focus. While those methods all do work with time and effort, I was blown away by how exponentially fast my targeted traffic started growing after I implemented Twitter into my marketing strategies. The thing with Twitter is, you can search your targeted niche - whatever that may be, and follow an endless amount of users in your niche. Say 20% of your follows end up following you back. Over time that turns into THOUSANDS of users following you who are all interested in whatever your niche is. Then all you have to do is tweet daily about your blog, website, or sales page and cha-ching: watch the traffic build. For all of you up and coming internet marketers, don’t miss out on Twitter. It changed my perspective on traffic building forever. I have my own blog over at www.tim-rodriguez .com , if any of you are interested in reading more about my twitter experiences.

I couldn't agree more with your second point. Social Media used to be an addon - something we'd use just for the sake of it. As time passed, it jumped into the forefront of our marketing campaigns and became an absolute neccesity. A combination of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and many other up and coming social media websites can end up being the difference between high targeted traffic to your website, and none at all.

I'd like to state the importance of Twitter from my own personal experience. When I started out in Internet Marketing, I used conventional techniques to drive targeted traffic to my website. These techniques included forum posting, article submitting, and keyword focus. While those methods all do work with time and effort, I was blown away by how exponentially fast my targeted traffic started growing after I implemented Twitter into my marketing strategies. The thing with Twitter is, you can search your targeted niche - whatever that may be, and follow an endless amount of users in your niche. Say 20% of your follows end up following you back. Over time that turns into THOUSANDS of users following you who are all interested in whatever your niche is. Then all you have to do is tweet daily about your blog, website, or sales page and cha-ching: watch the traffic build. For all of you up and coming internet marketers, don’t miss out on Twitter. It changed my perspective on traffic building forever.

Thanks for the post, Meghan. I think its time for me to learn Pinterest and help my clients to publicize their Business. And yes, I second the thought of Jeff. Please write something about outsourcing and virtual assistants.

Content can have a direct result on sales. This is how Hubspot works! You guys know this, so do a lot of marketers.

Search has replaced half the purchasing cycle these days, the way google's search works and how facebook's search will work emphasises the value of content.

If you want to nurture leads online (and it’s a fact this can be done) then content is key. So you want to optimise this content for whoever is looking at it, this is why mobile is so important. As mobile internet usage increases it becomes ever more important.

Very informative post. Social media marketing is a methodical way used by many people who are looking to achieve the specific goal for their company or business. Thanks for sharing.

Andreas

It seems that a company will have to specially hire a marketing analyst to do Social Search to follow those companies' moguls to fallow them in their blog, tweeter, the Facebook, etc. Since I own a small company and use traditional marketing tools and research. I don't know if I should use my limited resources to do the hiring to see if I can get any ROI.

merrell snoddy

I am liking the discussion going on on the blog. I am starting a small business, and I am researching using Social Media and the way to use effectlly. I have learned more words just by reading this article.

In response to point 4: "Social Search is getting real." I think you're absolutely right. As a social media manager for hotels and tourism boards, I find it amazing the amount of content and interaction you can discover and get into with basic social monitoring tools. As more and more people are taking photographs and tagging your brand on social, we are going to see (we are seeing it already) a swell in quality user generated content that will be nearly unmanageable. One of those "good problems" to have. The problem will no longer be creating conversation, but holding conversation. And since more and more customers and guests are the ones posting content about your product, they are starting the conversation first, offering savvy hotels and other brands a less "intrusive" or "spammy" connection opportunity. Targeted conversation and customer service will become two key components, not just creative posts to fill up your stream. -

Great article. It's great to see that people are finally registering the importance of social media. Myspace has built a reputation that for many years kept people away from the idea of social media, however, the innovative people at FB, Pinterest, Google Etc. have lead social media down a very different path.

Facebook's Graph Search and the increase of mobile activity to utilize social media could be two huge game-changers in regard to how social media is used in marketing. Then again, they could be unheard of (more Facebook search, not mobile) in a few years.

As much as we try to stay on top of issues like this, sometimes they change so fast, you lose track of what is and is not important.

I believe that we are in a marketing paradigm shift. From the world of newspapers and even SEO, social media in all forms, has become the precipice of marketing.

Lynn Sponholz

Love the way you explain. Every business needs interact with social networking sites like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Youtube and many more to increase the exposure of the company. It allows you to join conversations with the community. Flowwing the right person on social media channels is the key

Excellent post, Meghan. Your presentation makes it all that more interesting for me to start planning a more integrated strategy for sales and social media marketing. While it would require the right approach for these sales experts to use social media as marketing platforms, the idea of having someone or a team (equipped with the right skills and understanding for both sales and SMM) to turn leads into sales opens up a great possibility. Thanks for the great article!

Great read Meghan. Very insightful. Chattaboom could be on its way to really impact how artists and brands connect, communicate, and are discovered. They are using the power of music to drive discovery. They are literally allowing users to communicate their moods and feelings with the hooks of artists songs regarding news, products, entertainment. You can talk with music now. Watch out for them as they evolve.

I especially like #6. Mobile is definitely coming into view very fast (I guess it has been for the last while) and many sites are not up to date. Many people leave because the site doesn't work on their iPhone or Android or whatever they have.

I definitely agree- social media is definitely less of a side game. In today's world, all businesses should be taking advantage of social media platforms to enhance their business. When utilized properly, social media can be used to accomplish a variety of goals such as: becomming more involved in the community, expanding a current client base, communicating with current customers, utilizing creative methods for advertising and for offering loyal customers (followers) special offers and coupons.